Robot plan to explore Mars

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 21

Robot plan to explore Mars

ROBIN McKIE

reports from London on future space

missions.

Senior Euro-American scientists are proposing a multi-billion dollar robot operation to Mars. The project — to land an automatic, mobile laboratory on the planet — will be outlined at a special international scientific meeting in Heidelberg, West Germany, later this month.

The mission’s proposer, a joint committee of United States National Academy of Sciences and European Science Foundation members, says its plans, which form a general package of suggested future missions, are both scientifically desirable and financially realistic. “At all times, United States and European space agency officials have been involved in our talks,” one of the report’s authors said.

Their document is intended as a blueprint for future international exploration of the planets and highlights three missions which would return particularly valuable data about the solar system and its origins. These are:

• A Mars expedition; • A mission to Saturn, involving landing on the planet’s giant, atmo-sphere-covered moon, Titan; © A flight to explore the asteroids, tiny planetary fragments made up of the solar system’s most primitive material.

The three projects would give European scientists their first direct experience of building planetary probes that would be funded equally by the European Space Agency and the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Previous Western missions which produced invaluable information and spectacular close-up views of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter have been funded by America, but spiralling costs in its space shuttle programme recently forced severe cutbacks in planetary projects. To fill the gap, Europe, the world’s newest space power, proposed a co-operative programme and the joint committee was set up to select priority missions. The Oxford University physicist, Dr Fred Taylor, a member of the committee, says the Martian mission would cost between $750 and $4500 million, depending on its complexity and sophistication. The cheapest version would involve dropping a relatively crude Martian “rover” that would be controlled directly from Earth. The most expensive would be a delicate, autonomous robot explorer that would be gently landed and could move independently across the Martian surface. Copyright — London Observer Service.